This felt like a bridge episode. Not that there is anything especially wrong with that. In fact. I did rather enjoy this episode. It just felt a little hollow, even though a ton of stuff happened in it.

Maybe there was this strange disconnect for me because it felt like a mission of the week. We had Nikita, Alex and Michael going out on a last ditch effort to retrieve the black box, and things go horribly awry, thanks to Amanda's manipulations. Is it just me, or have I watched this episode before?

Basically, Percy's legacy is finally over. The final black box is destroyed (assuming Amanda didn't somehow make a copy of it), Division is completely dead, and our group is finally free. That's a lot of stuff. I don't think they'll ever be able to settle down, especially when so much nastiness is spread throughout the world. Especially Nikita, who will never quit. I think she and Michael are not on the road to happiness, because he's ready to go, and she won't stop until her mission is complete.

The thing is, all these characters are in major need of some downtime. All of them are traumatized in some way, or messed with by Amanda, or seriously injured, or otherwise drained from the sheer chaos of recent events. These are not spies at the top of their game. I think Mikey and Birkoff are right, they should really make a run for it. At least now they won't have the combined forces of the United States military and clandestine operations after them, too.

Of course that would be the end of the show. It would be like saying hey, we can't possibly set everything right so we're gonna go to some tropical island and just exist for the next sixty years as a reward for all the crap we've been through. Except of course, there's Amanda, who will never let them be, who is now in league with The Shop (how utterly un-menacing that sounds) and their nasty technology.

It was very fitting for Owen/Sam to destroy the box, and it gave me some hope that maybe Owen isn't completely gone. Or perhaps he has the hots for Alex, and it was her pleading with him that got through his self-serving exterior. I hope so, because I don't like the idea of Owen/Sam as a bad guy. There were several moments where he seemed like our Owen, poor gullible Owen, wait... he did walk away with 300 million dollars. So maybe he's not so poor, but he still is gullible.

Bits:

At least Alex's money is still intact, I bet she will fund the group so they can reform into whatever they are going to be.

Love Cyrus, I'm so glad he came back. I still laugh every time I see him, though. Those Old Spice commercials he did were consistently hilarious.

I did like the interview scene with the flash to the first episode, although not so much with the pay off for that scene (even though Nikita's lines were awesome).

If this wasn't Nikita, I swear this episode was trying for a deadpan version of some kind of farce, with one little conflict after another leaving Michael and Nikita in continually awkward and random situations.

I groaned when Amanda pulled the 'you can't kill me' card again, and Sam bought it. The writer's love Amanda far too much, I think. Any self-respecting spy would've killed her a long time ago (since every character has had at least one chance to end her).

There were some great character moments, like I said before, like Ryan standing off the Seal guy with the detonator to the pillars holding up Division, and Sonia hitting the gas to mask their escape, and Alex playing the Turkish intelligence guy like a harp. It's nice to see all the characters acting like themselves for once.

Quotes:

Ryan: "How could I not see this?"
Birkhoff: "Well, you did just wake up from a coma."

Nikita: "If all anyone ever saw were the things I did for Division, they'd think I was a monster. If we can't believe that people change then, everything we're fighting for is meaningless."

Not a bad episode by a long shot, but not as good as I would've liked this close to the end. There were some good character moments, and the story made sense in the long term since it progressed the plot to a good and logical point launching point for the last couple of episodes. I guess I'm just slightly disappointed that the MacGuffin (the black box) we've been following for three seasons was destroyed in a semi-lackluster episode.

2 1/2 out of 4 Destroyed black boxes.

J.D. Balthazar is a confirmed nerd who loves most things sci-fi or fantasy-related.

8 comments:

Anonymous
said...

It was so great to have Cyrus back. But J.D. it was OLD SPICE not Old Navy :)

It'll be interesting if The Shop will turn out to be the group that Percy approached last season. I hope now that since The Shop is back in the game and the black box destroyed that Amanda won`t miss the elevator to hell any longer.

I am glad that the group is now out of Division. Nikita had its best episode when they were outside of that cursed place. But I still have the feeling that we will lose Michael at the end of the season although that would be quite repetitive now that Alex lost Sean. I hope the writers won't give us Olex. I want Owen back but not with Alex.

One question: The red bikini mission was the first we saw Nikita do in season one. But I cannot remember if she was already working against Division (than the debriefing wouldn't make sense) or not? It was weird that the debriefing scene looked like the typical Nikita flashback but the red bikini scenes did not.

That's what you get when you post at 1 in the morning. Thanks for the catch Anonymous.

I bet you're right about The Shop being the group Percy went to last season, although I doubt the show will reference that unless they bring in Xander Berkeley for a flashback (which I hope they do, I liked him a lot more than Amanda).

Nikita has been sliding down on my "to watch list" and is no longer anywhere near to a "must column" so I just caught up with this episode...

The episode is always much better when it's about our team without hundreds of people running around Division, so I liked it a bit more than the previous ones.

I guess the high value target was Amanda to The Shop. What could they possibly need from her? I hope she didn't copy the black box content, because it's getting really old, but why else would she be of value to them? She said that for a plan to work they need Nikita and Michael alive - can't be good.

As far as Owen/Sam destroying the black box I didn't see it as a sign of Owen coming back, rather than Sam knowing he is on that box and destroying once and for all.

I enjoyed this episode, not so much for the story which, as you point out J.D. has been done before, but for the many small moments that made me smile.

I liked the shift when Nikita went from calling her former colleague Owen to Sam; I loved the conversation between Alex and Owen; Nikita and Michael in the shower was hilarious; Ryan facing off with Vasquez was fantastic.

I agree completely that Amanda's character has run her course and it is time for her to go. At least these black boxes are all gone -- or so we can only hope.